The Poker Mutant will be retiring (mostly) from poker on 1 January. This is the latest installment in his thrilling countdown to the End of Times.

Family obligations have tended to keep me from playing the Ignition Casino $100K GTD NLHE on Sundays. There’s stuff to do to get the house ready for our Sunday family dinner—even though I’m, thankfully, not doing the cooking—and I don’t like to buy into a tournament of that size late, or be playing it while we’ve got company, even if it’s company that’s here every week.

But my father’s out of town for the holidays this week and I’m down to the wire on my $100K-before-the-end-of-the-year-or-bust plan (only $93K to go!) so I decided to play it this week.

Despite the fact that I got aces twice in 90 minutes (about 5 times better than the normal distribution) I was under the starting stack, after having to lay down a 3-bet hand of [ac kc] and a few other attempts to get some chips. Still I was nearly 40bb deep when I got [ah kh] on the big blind, with a dead small blind. UTG min-raised, everyone folded to me, and I pushed it up to 2K, which he called. The all-spade flop was unpleasant, but I had top-top and overbet the pot by a thousand or so going all in. UTG called with both a gutshot straight and a spade draw, and booth of them got there in sequence. I was marginally ahead when the money went in, but I was getting a chop at best after the turn.

And that’s the way the make-a-fortune cookie crumbles.

I played the Ignition Casino $5K GTD NLHE  after the guests left. 642 entries. I doubled up and then some in the middle stage but went pretty card dead as small stacks were shoving toward the bubble, and lost a lot of ground. I was under 10bb when I picked up queens on the button and we were on the last couple spots before the bubble. A big stack in early position raised, I shoved, he had aces! And he hit an ace on the flop! I finished in 109th place. 108 places paid.